Study On The Characteristics And Laws Of The Development Of The Pupil's Spatial Sence

Since more than one century the aim and content of the geometry curriculum of the primary and middle schools have been the focus of the disputation and concerned about by the people. From the comparison of content and requirement of the geometry curriculum of various countries, we will easily find that there are a great deal of differences. As to the geometry teaching, the difference is much more apparent, we do still need to find the general characteristics of the geometry curriculum from the point of view of curriculum. Even if the problem it faced is very complicated, and thereby we may do macroscopic design and do microscopic research, and then establish the reasonable geometry curriculum system.In geometry curriculum, regardless of the disputation, the spatial imagination (a part of the spatial ability) is considered the most important part among the many mathematic abilities. Spatial sense, as the basis of the spatial imagination development, should be one of the main training aims of the geometry curriculum during the primary education or even the compulsory education. In the past, the study of the training and development of the spatial ability of the children always inclined to do it from the point of view of psychology, even if from the point of the mathematic education, it is almost incompletely and local, lacking of systematic, and all- round research to the development laws and characteristics of spatial sense of the students. So that causing the construction of the geometry curriculum lacking of research basis. Therefore this study tries to analyze the fundamental elements of the spatial sense from curriculum point of view. Study the curriculum elements which support its development, investigate the development laws and characteristics of the spatial sense of the student, separate the development stages and levels of the student and propose the suggestions of determining the content of the geometry curriculum concerned.This study first uses the qualitative research method to analyze, from the point of curriculum, the fundamental elements of the spatial sense, and demarcate the three development levels of the spatial sense: Level 1 direct observation imagination; Level 2 simple abstractive and process; Level 3 further abstraction. Thereby design the quantitative figure (test paper) for investigating the development laws, characteristics and level of the spatial sense of the students.And then we selected more than 500 pupils (grade2—grade6) from three primary schools as example, and tested them. Through the statistics analytic result of the test, we obtained the development laws and characteristics of the spatial sense of the pupils, summarized the stages and characteristics of the spatial sense development of the pupils and the level they can reach. The main conclusions are as follows:Investigating the development laws of the spatial sense of the student from the point of the grade, we find the development level of the spatial sense of the student of the grade2—3 (age7—8) is comparative unanimous, the differences of the development level of the student of 4—6 grade (age9—11) are not very great. Therefore, in the process of spatial sense development, we may consider them as two development stages: there are not any essential difference in some aspects of the spatial sense development of the2—6 grade, especially when problems less related with sense, and only related with resolving the problem of spatial sense, the difference between the grades are not apparent, student of lower grades can reach better level; when resolving complicated problems which need higher resolution, the differences will appear, as this time the student of higher grades have superiority.Teaching interference in time is very necessary, if only providing the students of lower grade with some proper teaching interference materials, there would be better development in spatial sense. If otherwise, the spatial sense development of the student would be restrained and even it would be the weak-side which can not be compensated. But to understand the sense, usually it is proper at the age of 9—10 when the student in grade4.After the analyses of the test results, we find all the 2—6 grade student can reach the requirement of the first level of the test content: the 2—3 grade student can reach the second level in some aspects; and the4—6 grade student can reach the level 3 in some aspects.We mainly investigated two sides of the research of the characteristics of the spatial sense development: one side is that the spatial sense development has not apparent differences in sex. The spatial sense of all the 5grades students which were tested in three test sets does not exist any apparent differences, the score dispersion of both male and female students does not appear any law. The second side is that the spatial sense development has a close positive relationship with the score of mathematics. The spatial sense test results between the students with good mathematics score and the student with poor mathematics score is quite different, and this difference will be getting greater as the grade of the students escalate.Based on the study result mentioned above, we propose the following suggestion to arrangement of the related content of geometry curriculum for primary school: In the first learning stage, the content of level 1 or part of level 2 may be set; In the second learning stage, the content of level 2 or part of the level 3 may be set; the other content of level 3 will be completed in the third learning stage (middle school stage).Some problems discussed in this study do still have space for proceeding further and deeper consideration and study. Therefore extension and propagation of this study are very significant and meaningful. We hope the related study may form the basis and foundation for constructing the geometry curriculum.